The facade inItaly Course, the apse inBig Square. The Pieve di Santa Maria Assunta in Arezzo is the link between two of the most important and lived-in places in the city. Built starting in the year 1000, this Romanesque parish church presents itself in all its magnificence with a façade with three portals. We all look at the Pieve with our noses in the air right away, because we cannot help but be fascinated by its bell tower, called “of a hundred holes” for the mullioned windows, once ten on each side, which make it unique.

At the back of the church is the large semicircular apse: small single-lancet windows illuminate the interior of the crypt where the 1346 gilded silver reliquary bust with the relics of San Donato Vescovo, the Patron Saint of Arezzo, is kept.

You only have to cross its threshold to admire, inside, a masterpiece of fourteenth-century painting:the Polyptychwith the Virgin and Child and Saints John the Evangelist, Donatus, John the Baptist and Matthew commissioned toPeter Lorenzettiin 1320, not counting the beautiful Chapel of the SS. Sacramento, where delicate pastel-colored frescoes by the masterLouis Ademollo, frame a sweet fifteenth-century statue of the Madonna in polychrome terracotta.